


You May Be Acquainted with the Night

by HarpiaHarpyja



Series: How Soon Unaccountable [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Accidental Body Swapping, Actual Force Nerd Kylo Ren, Actual Force Nerd Rey of Jakku, Actual Prudish Virgin Kylo Ren, Canon Compliant, Dream Boning on the Astral Plane, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Mutual Pining, Post TLJ, Rey Curses Like a Guttersnipe, Reylo - Freeform, Steam Dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 06:10:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13607229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja
Summary: Rattled by an unsettling dream and convinced Kylo Ren has had it too, Rey uses meditation to open the connection between them. But her approach to dealing with their increasing closeness through the Force is possibly a bit too direct for the time and place.





	You May Be Acquainted with the Night

**Author's Note:**

> The events of this story occur a day or two after the second part of this series (Beat Me at My Own Damn Game). I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading!

_Ben?_

She is in the dark, but she is not afraid. The dark is fluid and alive around her, like water thick with salt, like blood. It holds her up, eases her, makes each movement she takes slow and deliberate, gloves her naked skin. She can’t tell if she is walking upright or swimming through it or something else entirely. But she feels her way.

_I’m here._

Her hand brushes something that wasn’t there a moment before. It has materialized in front of her, warm and firm and breathing, human skin. She touches carefully, taking stock: grooves of palms, long lines of arms, slope of neck into shoulders, rise of muscle at the chest, flat span of abdomen, dip of navel, sharp curve of bone at hips, groin, thighs, calves, feet. The action, each touch she gives, is mirrored back on her own body, lighting every nerve deliciously and causing a shiver that starts at her heart and trickles its way out through every pore of her skin.

_Do you feel that?_

_Yeah. And you, too._

She can see the face now, and the body, suspended in the dark before hers, and she knows it because she has already felt it, as it has her. Her hands rise to cup the face—a man’s face, a face she has seen again and again but never like this—long jaw, sharp nose, soft mouth, broad brow, seam of a scar, the dark, dark eyes. Staring straight into hers, through hers, seeing her and everything beyond her, asking something of her.

_I can feel you. Not quite energy. It’s just . . . you. Distilled, almost. Does that make sense?_

_Yes._

They are entwined, like lovers, like halves of a whole, luminous skin meeting luminous skin. Her legs fasten behind his hips, she rolls against him, he presses into her; his arms clasp at her back as her hands pull through his hair; her neck arches back, his mouth presses to her breasts. Heat builds. She catalogs everything. Each sensation, each movement, each color and sound; it’s what she knows how to do. But she is greater than the sum of the parts, and she forgets herself. Her heart thrums and she breathes hard against his ear, secrets and songs and whispered pulsing prayers from something outside herself and him.

_We could just_ . . .

. . . _stay like this_ . . .

Foreheads touch, hot skin dewed and flushed. Traces of sweat and kisses mingle. Short quavering breaths meet inches from parted lips. She opens her eyes and finds herself looking back into them: sharp and bright, fringed by dark lashes, the dusted green of desert grass. She feels through his body the softness of her own thighs cleaving to him, the lean muscles of her arms holding fast, the rise and fall of her shoulders with each breath. How his chest aches with fathomless longing, veneration, fear, captivation, hope. She is an entire world, a galaxy, a universe. She is everything, everything, everything.

. . . _until it ends._

====

 

Rey acknowledged that these were not the ideal circumstances under which to attempt this. Her bedding was tangled, her shirt and skin were sticky with sweat, her mind was still half gripped by sleep and addled by what she’d dreamt. But she didn’t foresee simply shunting the issue aside until later—the next morning, afternoon, evening, another day, another week—working out very well. She was shaken, and she wanted, _needed_ , to talk to someone. That there were actually a number of “someones” now was a luxury she was still growing accustomed to. 

But in this case, the only person she could talk to about it was the only person already involved. She felt somehow traitorous in her utter certainty that he would be receptive. This, at least, was a familiar realization to her. Had he had the same dream? _Was_ it a dream, or something else? 

She kicked her blanket away and rolled to her feet to go splash some water on her face from the bottle she kept nearby. The water was warm and smelled slightly metallic. Tasted it, too. But it woke her further enough to examine her decision and confirm that this was what she wanted to do right now. She didn’t take a look at the time; it might discourage her, stoke the voice in her head that insisted feebly that this was not sensible.

Returning to the bed, Rey perched on the edge, her legs drawn up and crossed in front of her, a hand laid flat and loose at each knee. Perhaps, she thought, it would be easier to let her mind do what was necessary in this state, still so uninhibited, freshly freed from the braces of sleep. She was right, to a degree. The dream, its images and feelings, were difficult to allay, but once she managed to do so, the rest came almost on its own. It even seemed to help that Rey didn’t know if what she was attempting would work at all, as if her acknowledgment that she was not the one in control made it a simple matter to allow the Force to steer her thoughts.

_Ben? Are you there?_

The moment she allowed herself to feel foolish for making such a direct plea, Rey began to slip out. She drew a steadying breath and held it, releasing it as she visualized her goal, remembered the way it had been last time she released herself into something outside of what she knew the world to be, when she let the Force fill her. She reached again, strands of intention and feeling cabling into a more certain lifeline. She knew what she was looking for because it was, in some way, a reflection of herself.

_Ben_.

It caught this time. Rey wasn’t sure how. The best she could do was to liken it to a current looping, flowing through one terminal to return to the start and back again. Something stirred in the emptiness: fierce strength; uneasy solitude; resolve like a fist, seamed with brittle, uncertain lines. An essence she knew. Rey’s fingers twitched.

She opened her eyes and looked over her shoulder. Her bed was small, even for a single person, and it was now host to a body other than hers and only visible to her eyes. Ben lay supine and staring up at her. For a moment it was somehow so reminiscent of how that dream had begun that Rey jumped to her feet and took a step back, like such events would continue to proceed regardless of her intent if she didn’t get physically away. 

He sat up, passed a hand over his face. He’d been sleeping, or close enough to it that his voice was thick, but he gave the impression of one who was never comfortable in the act of such inaction. His shoulders tightened once and released, and he looked immediately prepared to leap up and fight despite being half undressed and lacking any weapon other than himself. 

“What’s wrong?”

His evident concern niggled at Rey, and she returned to her post at the bed’s edge, conscious of how much space Ben took up behind her and trying not to stare at him. “Nothing. I just didn’t really expect that to work.”

“What did you do?” He was moving down to the end of the bed, where he swung his feet to the floor and sat hunched over himself like he was aware that he somehow didn’t quite fit where he was appearing to her—elbows on knees, the planes of his shoulders sharp and pale. He glanced over one of them at her. “ _This_? You did this?”

He sounded astonished, but Rey also picked up on something else. Jealousy, maybe. 

“I thought I was hearing you,” he went on, angling his body more toward her now that his attention was sparked. “But I assumed it was just some trick of the mind. How did you—”

“What we did the last time. I began meditating, and I tried reaching out to find you. What you said, I think you weren’t far off. The way everything’s connected, once you’re _in_ it like that, if you know what you’re trying to find.” Rey was quite pleased with herself and did little to hide it. “I reached for what I felt of you last time, and I must have found it, or the Force guided me to it. To you. And then it just opened up like always.”

If Ben was impressed (and Rey was sure he was), he wasn’t very demonstrative. That annoyed her, for as little as she needed or wished for his approval. Instead he looked more like he was reasoning something out, comparing some past experience of his own with what she was telling him.

“Why were you trying to find me now?”

In her excitement over her success, Rey had nearly overlooked her purpose and wasn’t certain she still wanted to pursue it. Especially with him sitting so close, looking so much as he had in her dream, down to tiny marks on his arms and chest. She could see them all now and match them to what she’d seen and felt in sleep. It was chilling.

Yet it hadn’t been some vision of the future. She felt confident of that. It was too strange and unreal. And it hadn’t been some cruel illusion knitted together over the bones of her deepest desires and weaknesses. Rey didn’t need to fear it, and she didn’t want to doubt it. But she did need to know if it had happened to Ben, too.

“I . . .” She trailed off, drawing her arms around herself and watching the ochre glow of her single lamp against the wall. “Had a dream. I think it was a dream. I don’t really know what else it could have been. Tonight. Just before this. We were—you and I were—” Her face contracted with the strain of trying to find a way to explain it delicately, which was not a thing that came naturally to her.

“Together.”

She stiffened. He’d had it, too, then. The way he said the word “together” was so particular she knew precisely what he meant, even if it had been so abstract in the dream that she still doubted her impressions of it. Rey’s skin went a little hot, but she wasn’t embarrassed. It was easier to go on now knowing that she didn’t have to explain in greater detail than was needed to make her point. 

“Yes. But it was so strange. At some point I wasn’t myself any longer, but I wasn’t outside of it, either. Not like a spectator. I was _you_ , I swear.” Experiencing everything as he was. Seeing herself as he saw her. Remembering it made her throat constrict like she was going to cry, and she stopped speaking to avoid her voice seizing. 

“It was the same for me.” 

That was all he said. It was a small consolation that he was as unnerved by it as she was, as reluctant to detail it. The thing was, at least in Rey’s mind, the difficult aspect to parse wasn’t that it had been so sexual. Though it had not been a significant part of her life on Jakku, sex was not a matter that made Rey uncomfortable. And she’d already come to terms with the fact of her attraction to Ben, which would have made something like this inconvenient but not very surprising.

The bothersome thing was that, even if this had only been a dream, they’d both had it. They’d both seen into the other person in a way that even reading another’s mind didn’t allow. But where that was an invasion, malicious in its intent to dominate and take, this had been, for all its disquieting realness, intimate and beautiful in a way that hearkened to something she had already done. Rey didn’t want to assume Ben had drawn the same conclusions, but she was afraid to ask at the risk of finding otherwise.

She rubbed at her eyes. “I shouldn’t have tried to find you just for this. It was only a dream.”

“One we both had. At the same time. Was it familiar to you, in some way?”

Perhaps Rey had been hasty to think he wasn’t of a similar mind. “Yeah. Yeah, it was. Like something I’d done. I mean, not _that_ , exactly.”

“No.” He actually laughed, a short, cheerless sound. “More like an echo.”

“Right . . .” She nodded slowly, developing the idea. “Same sound, but distorted by the conditions.”

“Exactly.” Of course he sounded impressed now. _Too late_ , she thought.

“It was like,” Rey said, measuring her words as she teased a theory out, “when we meditated together, did you get to a point where you almost didn’t feel anything? Your body, I mean. And then lost track of yourself entirely? But it didn’t seem to matter.”

“That’s a way of saying it. I don’t know how long I spent like that. I don’t remember much of it beyond the first minute, actually. It wasn’t so different from any other meditation in that respect. At first.” He straightened up. “But you were there, too, which was not typical. And it all melted together. Me. Time and you and the rest of it. Whatever a person becomes when they shed their body.”

That was an unexpectedly poetic way to think of it, if somewhat morbid, but Rey agreed, and that spurred her on.

“Maybe this was my mind’s way of trying to rationalize that. And yours. Whatever happened in between. An echo of something too . . . intimate. Souls meeting, becoming—” She cut herself off and laughed bitterly, a little delirious from the hour and the strange turns her ideas were beginning to take. This discussion was reminding her why she preferred the literal. “This is ridiculous. Every time I think this is something I can live with, until . . . until I’m not anymore, it gets further out of reach. We thought meditation could help control it more, and it _did_ , I guess, because you’re here when I wanted you to be. But maybe it was too much.”

“How do you mean?”

Rey grasped for words. “Put us too close. Am I going to keep having dreams like that, or whatever it was? Are _you_? It’s like we’re just going to keep being pushed together until it’s unbearable.”

“I hate to remind you,” he said. “But by most estimations, we were already too close before any unconventional meditation was on the table.”

She laughed again, still caustic but demoralized by the truth in what he said. His hand slid across the bed to seek hers where she had it folded into a tangle of blanket. Unthinking, she wound her fingers through his and squeezed. The now familiar contact made her feel better, and at some point in the last weeks she’d moved beyond reasoning that such a thing was dangerous to indulge. She and Ben were at some weird, unsustainable impasse, but they weren’t a threat to each other. 

They were only a threat to the people around them, who they continued to hide it from. Rey doubted that was how he saw it. He had already proved that he had essentially no regard for how their actions affected anyone beyond him and her. She envied that a little, even as she held the inherent selfishness and her own version of it in contempt. 

Giving in to an impulse, Rey drew her hand out of his and crawled to sit just behind him instead. She hesitated, then decided she’d already begun and looped her arms around his shoulders, draping herself over him and pressing her face into the curve of his neck. His back rose and fell against her chest, resuming a regular rhythm after an initial catch at her boldness. Rey wondered if she should say something but could only think of how warm his skin was against her cheek and how it would be very easy from this angle to touch her lips to his throat. Maybe if she held him close enough she could melt into him and not have to think about any of this anymore. 

Maybe she was still dreaming.

“What are you doing?” Kriff, he asked too many questions at the worst times. But one of his hands was moving to hers where they rested over his chest, trying to knot their fingers together again, so Rey didn’t think he was asking out of total ignorance.

“I don’t know.” 

She squeezed her eyes shut and felt a tear track down her face, smearing from her skin to his. He must have been able to feel the way her heart pounded to fill the beats between each of his breaths. She was caught in a trap of her own making and only felt mutinously like making it worse. His head shifted, and when she opened her eyes he was watching her out of the corner of his own with a look so tender and almost terrified that she drew back a little, conscious of what she was doing. If she’d made this trap, she wasn’t the only one in it. This wasn’t right.

She hissed a favorite obscenity under her breath as a few more tears rolled over her cheek. The next tear was welling, but Ben reached it first, thumbing it gently away as it fell along her nose. “You curse like a guttersnipe.”

The gesture fortified something in Rey, even if Ben couldn’t keep his opinions to himself, and she unwound herself from him, bringing a hand to his face and her mouth to his before she could think better of it. The angle was awkward, as was the fact that she was immediately aware that he was as inexperienced at this as she was. But he yielded to her so easily that any concerns that she might be overstepping, reading him wrong, or simply too late were extinguished, and she shifted to meet him more easily, kissing him with greater conviction.

He lacked much finesse in the moment; he’d been starved so long of affection, even after the measured moments he and Rey had shared before this, she almost wondered that she had been the one to break first. She didn’t care. His lips were soft and he responded to each movement she made like he’d already anticipated it—a hand in her hair, a thumb tracing her jaw, his lips catching hers between them.

It didn’t last long. Despite the way each of them pursued the other, the unschooled eagerness of his hands on her, Ben managed to get a word in eventually.

“Rey.” He breathed it hard into her mouth, but she didn’t stop until he said it again, stamping her name against her hair as she dipped her face to seek new bits of skin to acquaint her mouth to. “Rey, wait.”

With great reluctance, she paused and lifted her face to rest her chin on his shoulder. “What . . .” One of her hands trailed down his stomach as she tried to be grateful of the chance to catch her breath and not to think about how the muscles there felt as they tensed and relaxed at her touch. The request shouldn’t have bothered her so much, but it did. She’d spent most of her life waiting for other people; she was tired of it. “Why?”

But his hesitation, even belated, was a blow to her confidence and she didn’t wait for him to answer before pulling away and falling onto her back. She pressed the heels of her hands hard against her eyes and drew a shaky breath. At least her inexplicable tears had ceased. Funny, because she actually felt a little like crying now. “Never mind. I thought you—never mind.”

“I thought so too,” he said flatly. Ben laid down beside her, his legs curled against hers, the two of them pressed together in her narrow bed. He tucked her head under his chin. “I do. But this . . . isn’t real, Rey.” 

“It feels real enough.” She snatched at his hand to prove the point to herself if not to him. He was shaking.

“It’s not. It is not _enough_.” He leaned over her to look directly into her face, and she was dismayed to find his eyes beginning to blaze with the mounting agitation in his voice. “I’m not really there. You’re not really here with me. This might end at any moment. It’s all just minutes at a time. Doesn’t that bother you? Why are you so satisfied with half measures?”

Rey gaped at him, unable to think of an immediate answer that wouldn’t sound defensive or hostile. She pressed a hand to his shoulder instead, thinking it might divert some of the energy quivering off of him. All at once she was regretting what had just transpired. He wasn’t entirely wrong, and she hated it. 

“I’m . . .” They’d been over this already in so many other ways, she wasn’t sure what else to say. “I’m not. Satisfied with it. But it’s all there is. Unless . . . unless you, or I—and I can’t, I won’t, you know what that would—”

“Don’t. Please.” He shut his eyes in an effort to center himself, then moved away to settle at her side again, staring up at a ceiling she couldn’t see. “Can you end this?”

“End this?” It took her a moment to realize what he meant. When she did, Rey felt an unexpected hurt at the question. The last thing she wanted right now was to be alone, and he had just asked her for it. She was almost glad to be unsure of the answer. “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I haven’t been consciously keeping it open. I think we just have to wait.”

He made a dismissive sound. “Oh, good.”

“I can try, but I don’t know if it would work. I’d probably have to convince myself I want you gone, for a start.”

“Don’t you?” He sounded almost relieved.

“No, not really. You’re the one who asked if I could close it.” Rey bit her lip. “I’m sorry.”

He considered and conceded. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I did, though. What I saw tonight, what we saw . . . it was unsettling, but I wanted it, too. I wanted . . .” She rolled her head to look at him, stricken by the change in the light on his profile, a bluish haze stark against the warmer glow of her room. “But you’re right. This is hardly real, is it? Barely more real than a dream.”

“Not a bad one, though.”

His tone was surprisingly teasing, and Rey allowed the small uptick it provoked at the corner of her mouth. “Not a bad one.”

She felt Ben tense a bit, and though the silence lingered, Rey sensed it was because he was thinking something over or trying to decide how to voice it. He was still staring fixedly at the space above them.

“I think I had dreams of you before. Or visions. A long time ago, before I ever knew who you were.”

That was not what Rey was expecting, and her stomach dropped a little because all she could think was that the same had happened to her. It was, until recently, something she had not spent much time thinking about. He was looking at her now, and he must have seen the flicker of realization in her eyes because his mouth quirked in satisfaction. “You too?”

“Yeah.” Rey thought back to years of strange impressions on waking, dreams and nightmares alike: images of a dark-haired boy with ink-stained hands bent over paper and pen; a voice unknown to her and yet familiar calling her name in a gray-lit hall; a lanky youth laughing with his friends; a masked horror prowling toward her in a forest she could never have seen. “From when I was very young. Never very often, but I remember them. They felt different. Not like ordinary dreams. More like when I dreamt of islands.”

“I used to have others, not always when I was asleep. Like that, but . . . darker. For a long time I preferred the ones of you. The girl in the desert.” A muscle in his cheek twitched. “I tried to get your attention once, I think. You were always alone.”

“Of course I was.” Her expression became wistful. “But you weren’t.”

“No. Not always.”

“Or right now.” She tilted her head to press her mouth gently to his shoulder; not a kiss but a light, lingering nudge close to where the long scar she’d made marred his skin. She thought at least she could be allowed that, and he said nothing. “Go to sleep. This will end when it ends.”

“Another half measure.”

Rey had already rolled over slightly and closed her eyes, set on her decision and wrung out enough not to care, but she cracked one eye open anyway. “When this happens again I’ll see about trying to end it by sheer force of will. Or better still, you can.”

Ben shifted and stretched his legs, eventually settling with his back against hers. “Sheer force of will. I look forward to that.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story is taken from lyrics to Amanda Palmer's _Astronaut_.


End file.
